Larry Oda addresses the JACL National Council during the JACL National Convention. Oda was re-elected as JACL national president. This will be his fourth term in the role, unprecedented in JACL’s history. (Photo: George Toshio Johnston)
As JACL prexy enters his fourth term, can a restabilized JACL finally move forward?
By P.C. Staff
“I’d like to thank all of you for entrusting me with the future of the JACL again these next couple of years. I look forward to serving again as national president.”
Those words by newly installed JACL National President Larry Oda, shortly after Hawaii’s Rep. Jill Tokuda administered the oath of office for the new 2024-26 JACL officers present at the July 13 Sayonara Gala at the JACL National Convention in Philadelphia, were part of his first official statement as he entered his fourth stint leading the organization.
Oda is no stranger, however, to making remarks after becoming JACL national president, having been elected to back-to-back two-year terms in 2006 and 2008. With this most recent election, he has been elected to yet another consecutive biennium — making him the only person in JACL’s history to have served in the role more than two terms. Two years from now, Oda will have served as JACL national president for four two-year terms.
Does that make him some sort of glutton for punishment? No, says Oda. Rather, he feels a deep responsibility regarding JACL’s future. “The organization needs to continue, and it needs to have some leadership,” Oda told the Pacific Citizen. “I would probably say that there are better leaders, but I’m the best they could do at this point.”
During the convention’s July 11 Candidates Forum, Oda said, “I came back to the organization two years ago because our chapter was concerned, I think our district was concerned, that there were no candidates at all. So, you know, that showed me that . . . something happened, you know. We fell down.”
Oda’s remark was in reference to the situation by mid-2022, when there were no candidates running for election for any of the open positions, including the office of JACL national president. As the only person to run for the position, he won.
In August 2022, when the Pacific Citizen asked Oda (See Aug. 26, 2023, Pacific Citizen) whether he thought the JACL was facing a crisis, he answered: “We may be hiding our head in the sand, but, yeah, I think it is a crisis. I mean, for the whole slate to be empty?”
In 2024, when prompted to revisit his thoughts from two years earlier, Oda said, “When I made those comments, maybe I had my head in the sand, too, because I thought that all the infrastructure was intact and that I could step in, everything — the finances, financial reporting — would be as it was before. But it seems that as we got into it, I think I was told that we were three audits behind. And, you know, I assumed, ‘Well, well, no big deal.’ It’s just a matter of getting it done.”
As it turned out, several unanticipated problems faced Oda, namely a gap in institutional knowledge, procedures and best practices that occurred in the wake of the 2015 retirement of former business manager Clyde Izumi, who was succeeded by Matthew Walters, who himself left JACL to work and live in Japan in 2018. “That’s why a lot of our finances kind of fell apart,” Oda opined, referring to the interim period when there was no full-time JACL business manager, followed by the tenure of Walters’ successor, who has since left the employ of the JACL.
Then there were other time-consuming and unforeseen financial obstacles that occurred during Oda’s 2022-24 tenure: For the former, one example: addressing the years-in-the-making disarray of the JACL’s Legacy Fund (See Nov. 17, 2023, Pacific Citizen), which as of the 2024 National Convention appears to finally have been addressed to the satisfaction of most in JACL.
For the latter, there was the financial hit the organization took when workers at the site of the 2023 JACL National Convention — the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Los Angeles Downtown — went on strike, with the JACL taking the principled but costly stand to not cross picket lines.
Yet another time-consuming issue for Oda was the pressure exerted upon National JACL to take a formal stance on Israel’s prosecution of its war on the terrorist group Hamas after its Oct. 7, 2023, surprise attack on Israel that resulted in some 1,200 people killed and about 250 kidnapped.
Larry Oda catches up with former JACL National President/Executive Director Floyd Mori and his wife, Irene, at the recent JACL National Convention in Philadelphia. (Photo: Gil Asakawa)
Its retaliation exacted a deadly — depending on the source, between 35,000 and 40,000 killed — death toll for Palestinians residing in the Gaza Strip. The issue for JACL was resolved — for the time being — at the National Convention when the National Council approved Resolution 1, which addressed the “humanitarian crisis in Palestine” and called on the White House and Congress to “pressure Israel to implement a ceasefire.” (R1 may be read at tinyurl.com/mvaxv78v.)
In mid-2024, at the Lagrange Point between his first biennium of this decade as president having ended and his second one having just begun, what does Oda think about where JACL is now versus 2022?
“We’re basically caught up now. When you’re thinking about painting a house and the house is on fire, you’ve got to forget about the painting and put out the fire,” Oda said. He had praise for Tom Fernandez, JACL’s chief financial officer, and Jonathan Okamoto, JACL treasurer/secretary, who have focused on getting JACL’s fiscal house back in order.
“Between Thomas and Jonathan, there’s an idea of how we fix it,” Oda said. “There’s a strategy to get us back to zero, but it’s not an immediate fix.” In other words, while the patient that is JACL may be stabilized, the League has many leagues to travel before recovery can be considered complete.
One of Oda’s pet projects that got moved to the backburner because of the need to impose some order on the chaos that had grown within the organization was his visioning project. It was an attempt to look far into the future regarding what the JACL might be like decades from now and how it might get there. The initial response was, for Oda, underwhelming.
“It wasn’t very well received in the beginning,” Oda said, referring to a visioning session that took place at the Nov. 5, 2022, National Board meeting (See Nov. 18, 2022, Pacific Citizen). “When I rolled out the visioning project at one of the board meetings, I got a tremendous amount of pushback . . . I was shocked.”
Months later, however, the visioning project was rolled out publicly at the 2023 JACL convention (See Aug. 11, 2023, Pacific Citizen), and it will presumably continue to move forward.
On the topic of how to address JACL’s declining membership — now less than 8,000 — Oda recalled that before and during his first stint as national president circa 2006, membership was around 15,000. He tied that figure to revenue for the organization, noting how that contrasted to the corporate sponsorships that JACL relies on today, with membership revenue considered unrestricted. “They’re giving us money to do a project. . . . We’re at the mercy of sponsors. We don’t get to choose what we want to do. We have to do what the sponsor wants. So, I want to meet with Dominique (Mashburn, vp, membership) and maybe Ashley (Bucher, JACL membership manager) to prod them a little bit, to come up with different ideas.”
Asked what he sees with regard to the future of Pacific Citizen with regard to JACL, Oda said, “I have always been a supporter of the concept of Pacific Citizen, a newspaper that reports on JA events,” Oda said. “A lot of people look at it as a drain on our budget,” adding that it also has an intangible value that defies a hard monetary return. “You can’t really put a number on public relations and publicity.”
On another topic, Pacific Citizen asked Oda to elaborate on his thoughts on how he plans to lay down the groundwork in the next two years for JACL’s 2029 centennial and how that ties into his visioning project, along with the eventual release of Lane Nishikawa’s “League of Dreams” documentary about JACL.
“I think that you bring up a good point. We should be positioning ourselves to take advantage of this, thinking about what kind of celebration we’re going to have, what kind of events we can produce to highlight JACL and highlight the 100 years, and have a rollout of a vision for the next 100 years. It’s more about making noise, about who we are, and what we are, what we’ve done.”
As for the still-gestating documentary, Oda said, “Maybe ‘League of Dreams’ is the first of a number of activities that JACL is going to do to highlight our existence and show how important we are. … We have a lot of credibility in Congress because of what we did back in 1988. And it’s still remembered, even though the guys that were there then are no longer there for the most part, but it’s still remembered. JACL is an organization that got something done. So, we need to capitalize on that, and, and keep our keep our name out in front of everybody.”
